EC "Artist's Choice" CD now available at Starbucks

[And No Coffee Table]

An "Artist's Choice" CD of songs selected by Elvis is now available at Starbucks locations. It does not appear to be available on Starbucks' website (hearmusic.com), but it will probably show up there eventually.

Here's the lineup:

1. Louis Armstrong - Let's Do It (Let's Fall In Love)
2. Muddy Waters - I Love The Life I Live (I Live The Life I Love)
3. Clifford Brown - Yesterdays
4. Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell - You Ain't Livin' Till You're Lovin'
5. Fleetwood Mac - Oh Well, Part 1
6. Aretha Franklin - Do Right Woman, Do Right Man
7. Joni Mitchell - The Last Time I Saw Richard
8. The Band - Tears Of Rage
9. Nick Lowe - I'm A Mess
10. George Jones - Mr. Fool
11. Lucinda Williams - Over Time
12. Rilo Kiley - Does He Love You?
13. Dusty Springfield - I Don't Want To Hear It Anymore
14. Randy Newman - Real Emotional Girl
15. Diana Krall - Almost Blue
16. Paul Simon - Peace Like A River
17. Joe Tex - The Love You Save (May Be Your Own)
18. Freda Payne - Bring The Boys Home

It includes fairly lengthy liner notes by EC, commenting on each track. (Oddly, he suggests at one point that "Stranger In The House" is on the CD, but it's not.)

I just discovered a press release for this CD here:
http://www.sacksco.com/roster/hearmusic ... o_rls.html

[scielle]

Here's the Starbucks page:
http://www.starbucks.com/hearmusic/prod ... s+Costello

[johnfoyle]

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/pop/218306_elvis01.html

Artist's Choice CD gives insights into Costello's musical journey
Friday, April 1, 2005

By GENE STOUT
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER POP MUSIC CRITIC

The latest Elvis Costello album doesn't include a single song by the English songwriting legend.


"Elvis Costello: Artist's Choice" is the newest release in Starbucks' Hear Music series featuring compilations of favorite songs by major artists.

Aside from being a clever marketing scheme by Starbucks, the Artist's Choice collections provide insight into the tastes and "influences" of major artists, from Norah Jones to Yo-Yo Ma to the late Ray Charles. It's a novel approach to packaging music.

"I've picked songs that illustrate how I've learned almost everything I know about music just from listening to records," Costello says in the album's liner notes.

"I've tried to tell the story behind every choice. I've also selected a few recent favorites with the suspicion that they will be songs that will stick around. I loved the rest of them long enough to know that they are not going anywhere."

Costello, who performs with the Imposters Thursday night at the Paramount Theatre, picked such songs as Louis Armstrong's "Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)," George Jones' "Mr. Fool," Aretha Franklin's "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man," Dusty Springfield's "I Don't Want To Hear It Anymore," Randy Newman's "Real Emotional Girl," Lucinda Williams' "Overtime" and Freda Payne's Vietnam-era antiwar song, "Bring the Boys Back." The last song on the 18-track collection is "Almost Blue" by Costello's wife, Diana Krall, who was featured in a previous Artist's Choice compilation.

The 18 songs reflect Costello's musical journey since childhood, though he acknowledges the collection falls far short of being a soundtrack of his life.

The Artist's Choice CDs, available exclusively at Starbucks stores, are products of the coffee company's Hear Music division, dedicated to providing new ways for customers to experience music. Hear Music also has launched a 24-hour digital music channel with XM Satellite Radio; the Starbucks Hear Music Coffeehouse in Santa Monica, Calif., where customers can choose from more than 15,000 CDs to create customized recordings, and Starbucks media bars, such as the one in Seattle.

In a booklet included with the album, Costello explains why he picked the songs. Armstrong, for example, was one of many artists he heard on the BBC Radio while growing up in England, and his mother was a fan of Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra, the Stan Kenton Orchestra and others.

"Eventually, as an adult, I got back to a few of the records that had been on that shelf in the family home," he writes. "It was only then that I understood the great debt that all singers and players owe to people like Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong, who first addressed the microphone with intimacy and rhythmic invention, rather than belting out a tune to the back row of the balcony."

Of Aretha Franklin and her album, "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You," he says, "I think it instilled in me a love for writing songs in the 3/4 and 6/8 time signature. I know that I've written many more songs in those meters than many people who started recording around 1977. I put it all down to spending hours listening to that Aretha album."

Costello describes Nick Lowe as "my oldest friend in this business that we call 'show,' " he writes. "I'm a Mess" from the album "The Convincer" contains "everything that is great about the man: an elegant, melancholic turn of phrase, an effortless, relaxed groove and beautifully judged singing."

The Artist's Choice album comes at a time of heightened interest in Costello. His current trek with the Imposters, dubbed "The Monkey Speaks His Mind" tour, features songs from the recent album "The Delivery Man" (Lost Highway), as well as dozens of his classic songs. A limited edition of "The Delivery Man," released March 1, includes a bonus disc, "The Clarksdale Sessions," featuring five alternative versions of songs from "Delivery Man."

Rhino Records plans to reissue Costello's watershed 1986 album, "King of America," on April 26. The package includes a bonus disc featuring 21 songs from the vaults, including many previously unreleased. Among the songs are spare, solo demo recordings of "Having It All," "Suffering Face," "Deportee" and "Indoor Fireworks."

Costello plans to take a break from the tour in late April to play three dates in the Southeast with the Pick-Ups, a band featuring Pete Thomas, Dave Faragher and guest musician David Hidalgo from Los Lobos. Imposters keyboardist Steve Nieve also will take a break from the tour to travel to London for the first recording sessions for his opera, "Welcome to the Voice."



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



COMING UP
ELVIS COSTELLO AND THE IMPOSTERS


WHAT: Pop-rock concert
WHEN: Thursday night at 8
WHERE: Paramount Theatre, 911 Pine St.
TICKETS: $27, $37 and $57 at Ticketmaster



P-I pop music critic Gene Stout can be reached at 206-448-8383 or genestout@seattlepi.com.

© 1998-2005 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

[SweetPear]

Had my son pick it up for me in Philadelphia. Yo, and it was $16.99!!
I was expecting it to be $8.99 or something like that.
Boy, what I won't spend for Elvis.

[laughingcrow]

I just emailed em to see if this is available to Region 2ites like me....it no let me buy on web page!

[johnfoyle]

1. Louis Armstrong - Let's Do It (Let's Fall In Love)

My mother tells me that one of the first words uttered was ' skin'. Apparently, I was demanding that she play Frank Sinatra’s I’ve Got You
Under My Skin’ again.

I grew up in a house full of these sounds; singers like Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald and Billy Eckstine, the recordings of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie
Parker, Miles Davis, the Nat Cole Trio, Lennie Tristano with Lee Konitz and the Stan Kenton Orchestra, as well as albums of Mozart and Bach that
my mother was then selling alongside her jazz favourites.

I realize now that I was very lucky. The BBC Radio was mostly playing light music’ in those days, The Laughing Policeman’ and Danny Kaye singing The Ugly Duckling.’ Rock and roll was happening but it
was very far off. I don’t remember hearing it at all as a small child.

Eventually, as an adult, I got back to a few of the records that had been on that shelf in the family home. It was only then that I understood the great debt that all singers and players owe to people like Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong, who first addressed the microphone with intimacy and rhythmic invention, rather than belting out a tune to the back row of the
balcony.

Even though this record was made in the 1950s, you are still hearing the musical revolutionary of the Hot Fives and Sevens. It is all about time. This is a joke with an eight-minute punch line. ' Lithuanians and Letts
do it’ Indeed.


2. Muddy Waters - I Love The Life I Live (I Live The Life I Love)

I first heard the Beatles in 1962 They changed everything. It is
completely ne to pick lust one song of theirs, so I won’t choose any of them.

There were so many great things to be heard at that time; the songs of Burt Bacharach and the first Tamla Motown records were coming in from America and there were numerous new British beat groups who would
produce incredible songwriters like Ray Davies and great singers like Steve Marriott.

Among all the new, young singers, my favourite was Georgie Fame. It seems strange to me now that while the Beatles acknowledged Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers and ‘old guys’ like Elvis Presley, Georgie
was introduciflg kids of my age, 9 or 10 by then, to the songs of Mose Allison and ion Hendricks. He was the first person that I ever heard cover a James Brown AND a Count Basie tune.

I realize now that Georgie Fame’s performance of this tune was a direct copy of the recording by Mose Allison but I love both records. The song is by the great Willie Dixon and a little later on I sought out this ‘original’ version.

These days, I lust love the way this record sounds, how the band parts all interlock and the fashion in which Muddy just start singing whenever he feels like it.

3. Clifford Brown - Yesterdays

I am the third in four generations of musicians in my family, both my father and grandfather being trumpet players. Sometimes I feel that I let the side down by not taking up the instrument.

My grandfather was trained at Kneller Hall, Military School of Music and after being wounded in the infantry during the First World War, he travelled the world as a ship’s musician, visiting New York several times in the 1920s. His journal contains the autographs of Paderewski and Duke Ellington. When he came home from sea and married my grandmother, he
played in theatre and cinema bands until the talkies took over most of the theatres. My grandmother always hated Al Jolson. She said, ' He put poor Pat out of work.’

My dad started out playing be-hop in Birkenhead, the town across the Mersey from Liverpool. Anyone will tell you that jazz just doesn’t pay, so after moving to London and playing on the modern jazz scene there,
he used his talent for singing to become a vocalist in a successful radio dance band just after I was born.

Like most trumpet players of his background, my dad really loves the records of Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, but I know his favourite player of all is Clifford Brown. In time, I really started to appreciate his playing too. It is hard to choose between this instrumental version of Jerome Kern’s wonderful song and the two great recordings by Billie
Holiday, but thanks to my dad, I will pick this one.


4. Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell - You Ain't Livin' Till You're Lovin'

Growing up in suburbia, west of London, I didn’t get to hear many bands playing live. I was far too young to go to the pub in Richmond when the Rolling Stones were playing there in the early ‘60s, though we only
lived half a mile away. The same was true when The Who played at a club on nearby Eel Pie Island in the Thames.

Most music only existed on record and the little bit of radio needle time given over to pop music before 1967. I was more fortunate than my friends in that my dad’s career with the Joe Loss Orchestra meant that he
had to learn many of the hits of the day. Once he had rehearsed a new tune, he would pass the records on to me. The many advance copies of hit 45s in my record collection are a testimony to the bizarre variety of
material that this dance band tackled.

When I was a teenager it seemed that only three albums were ever needed to have a party: This Is Soul (an Atlantic Records compilation), Tighten Up, Vol. 2 (a Trojan collection of rock steady) and Motown
Chartbusters, Vol. 3. From the very first bass notes, this unbelievably joyous record still puts me in mind of that time more than any other disc.

5. Fleetwood Mac - Oh Well, Part 1

I learned to play the guitar when I was 13 years old. Strangely, I didn’t start with some simple three-chord folk song but a relatively complex tune, Peter Green’s ‘Man OfThe World.’ Lads at school handed around
charts ot these mysterious chord symbols as if they were girlie pictures and we would try and work out what we heard on record.

lt was only much later that I realized that my ability to retain and sing hack all the saxophone solos on Georgie Fame records at 10 years old or the fact that I had always been able to harmonize along with the
Beatles, singing either part, meant that I was blessed with a pretty good ear for music.

Soon, I was picking my way through songbooks by all my favourite songwriters and began realizing that some printed changes were incorrect. The older musicians who had done the transcriptions probably had little understanding or interest in the records that I loved.

This song is by the ‘real’ Fleetwuod Mac It is just one of the frighteningly intense and original tracks that they cut around this time. They were then led by the great blues guitar of Peter Green, who was another resident of the Richmond area. I’d see him in the local record shop, a very cool hippie dude with his Jesus hair and rugby shirt.. well, that was a hip
style back then.

In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, he went through a very rough time of poor emotional and mental health and I would sometimes see him lurking in doorways around town, looking pretty haunted. I was delighted
to hear that he has latterly been restored to better health and is playing again. I will always be grateful that he wrote a song that made me so curious that I wanted to learn it.

6. Aretha Franklin - Do Right Woman, Do Right Man

When my Dad struck out as a solo singer in the late ‘60s, his masical taste changed somewhat. He would arrive with his latest records and passed on to me the following albums Surrealistic Pillow by the Jefferson Airplane, Oh Yeah by Charles Mingus, United by Marvin Gaye and Tammi
Terrell, the first Joni Mitchell record, Song To A Seagull, and the great Aretha Franklin album I Never Loved A Man The Way I Loved You.

Every track on that album could be in this slot. It is probably my favourite soul albam. The title track is ferociously passionate, and I believe that Aretha’s take on ‘Drown In My Own Tears’ even rivals the Ray Charles version.

I also think that if instilled in me love for writing songs in the 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures. I know that I’ve written many more songs in those
meters than many people who started recording arnand 1977. I put it all down to spending hours listening to that Aretha album.

However, if is this Dan Penn and Spnnner Oldham sang that has gone in deepest. For one thing I believe Dan Penn to be one of the great and underappreciated songwriters. He is to American songwriting what Elvis
Presley was to American singing. He put it all together in a special way. His melodies have an indelible stamp of the country like the songs of Hank
Cochran or Hoagy Carmichael.

The way the vocal backing groap, Aretha’s sisters, support her on this record is so wonderful that you would think that this version couldn’t be touched. I was therefore amazed, a couple of years later, to hear the same song brilliantly interpreted by Gram Parsons on the Flying Barrifo Brothers’ Gilded Palace Of Sin album. Now, here was a song that could change shape; be an R&B tune one minute and a country song the next.
If would make me curious enough to try and write in the same way.

7. Joni Mitchell - The Last Time I Saw Richard

I recently had the wonderful experience of interviewing Joni Mitchell for
a Vanity Fair article. We talked about everything under the sun for about
six and a half hours. In the introduction to our conversation, I wrote about
skipping off school in Liverpool, where I lived between 1970 and 1973,
to go and buy a ticket for a Joni concert.

I sent a message to my friend Tony Tremaco to let him know that I’d mentioned him in the article and he replied with a memory that I had not recalled. He said, ' Did you tell Joni that you came round to my house the day Blue came out because my parents were away and a group of us stayed up all night until we had memorized every word and note on the record?’

I hadn’t specifically remembered this but I know that I spent a remarkable amount of time listening to Joni Mitchell records, often alone in the dark. At that age I hadn’t lived any of the experiences described in
such remarkably candid songs but I had the idea that I might one day want to really understand what it meant to say, all good dreamers pass this way some day/hiding behind bottles in dark cafes.’ I’d live to
regret this desire.

8. The Band - Tears Of Rage

The choice of this song stands for so much that I love of Bob Dylan’s writing. The music was composed by one of The Band’s three remarkable vocalists, the late Richard Manuel. The song was initially featured on the
group’s debut album, Musicc from Big Pink.

The first Dylan song that I loved was ‘Honey Just Allow Me One More Chance,’ which was fhe B-side of ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ single that my Dad brought home. During the ‘60s, I thought of Bob Dylan as someone who made these incredible singles like ‘Maggie’s Farm,’ ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ and ‘Positively 4th Street.’ They sounded like nothing
else around. I also loved the Byrds’ ‘Mr. Tamborine Man,’ which I knew he had written and also ‘It’s Alright, Ma l’m Only Bleeding,’ which I first heard
in the movie Easy Rider.

Little by little, I heard more of his songs and bought Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde and really dug the spontaneous sound of these albums. A door opened and I realised that his songs had changed all
of the possibilities.

The first two Bond records really caught my imagination. There was soemthing about them, a mystery and a connection to another time in the music. The songs were almost impenetrable; they were singing about ‘Chest Fever’ and ‘The Unfaithful Servant,’ for Heaven’s sake.

To my adult ear this wonderful Dylan lyric seems to speak of the ungrateful child. This must have been a brave and novel proposition in the days when it was written, as people were supposedly embracing
untrammelled freedom with little sense of the consequences.

If points the way to many more grave and reflective songs with a similarly different agenda: ‘Time Passes Slowly,’ ‘Forever Young,’ ‘Senor (Tales Of Yankee Power) ’, ‘I Believe ln You,’ ‘Every Grain Of Sand,’
‘Ring Them Bells’ and the beautiful ‘Not Dark Yet.’ However, it
is Richard Manuel’s anguished reading of his own melody that draws me back to this song.

9. Nick Lowe - I'm A Mess

Nick Lowe is my oldest friend in this business that we call ‘show.’ I met him in the Grapes public house opposite The Cavern, in Liverpool in 1972. I was just getting started playing in public, and my singing partner and I featured several of Nick’s songs in our set. He could not have been more approachable and encouraging.

While many of my friends were trying to find hidden meanings in what I thought was rather dreary music like Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Pink Floyd, Nick’s songs for Brinsley Schwarz reminded me that it was okay to like Lee Dorsey. These things matter to you when you are 17.

When I moved back to London to try and find my way in music, I saw Nick play a lot. One day in 1976, I read that a new label was starting up called Stiff Records and that Nick was to be the first artist released.

A couple of days later I went sick from my day job and dropped off a copy of a demo tape that I had recorded in my bedroom and, as romantic as it sounds, I actually ran into Nick on my way home at the Underground station. He asked when I was going to be ‘treading the boards’ again. He always talked in that old-fashioned way.

It turned out that we would make six albums together over the next 10 years. Nick’s style of production was perfect for the Attractions, the group that was put together after the release of my first album, MyAim Is
True, in 1977.

Nick’s most famous song is probably ‘(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding,’ whether in the version that I cut with the Attractions, or as heard on one of the biggest-selling soundtrack albums of all time, The Bodyguard, or performed by Bill Murray in the karaoke scene in Lost In Translation.


In recent years, Nick has shunned a noisy style (and the production of such classics as ‘Shake That Rat’ and ‘Marie Provost’) for a line in soulful balladry, epitomised by ‘The Beast In Me,’ the song he wrote for his former father-in-law, Johnny Cash.

In the summer of ‘04, I saw Nick perform a superb solo show at the Bowery Ballroom, New York City. The best compliment that I could pay him afterwards was that he was now the equal of the singers and writers he greatly admires such as Charlie Rich, Jim Ford and, of course, Dan Penn.

This track from his wonderful album The Convincer contains everything that is great about the man: an elegant, melancholic turn of phrase, an effortless, relaxed groove and beautifully judged singing.

10. George Jones - Mr. Fool

When I was twenty-two I wrote a song called Stranger In The House,’ imagining the voice of George Jones singing it. Most of the country and western records I heard growing up in England were novelty tunes until the Byrds’ Sweetheart Of The Rodeo and Gram Parsons’ subsequent albums educated my ears to the soul of country music. George Jones’ records were a major revelation.

I soon realized that he was a song stylist as unique and special as Billie Holiday or James Carr. Any song that he sings becomes a George Jones’ song first and country music by virtue of the accompaniment. During
his time at Starday and Mercury Records, he cut track after track with extraordinary ways to move you. Jones’ sorrowful melisma on the title line of Mr. Fool’ has little equal among the heartbreak balladeers.

In 1978, when my name was just getting known, I got an invitation to record Stranger In The House’ with George for a record of duet performances. I can’t pretend that we were equally matched vocally, but
singing in the same studio as the man is something that I will never forget.



11. Lucinda Williams - Over Time

It is my belief that Lucinda is the closest living counterpart to Hank Williams, when it comes to writing from the heart with absolute economy. It is a bonus that her rock and roll vocal style will shake up any band in a fashion that I can only compare to Keith Richards’ guitar playing.

I could have included any one of a dozen wonderful songs, including ‘Blue,’ ‘Drunken Angel’ or ‘Changed The Locks’ but I have found myself haunted by this song since its release on the album World Without
Tears.


12. Rilo Kiley - Does He Love You?

I wanted to include at least one recent record and I cannot think of anything more impressive than this cut from the More Adventurous album.

The storytelling is remarkable, the melody unfolds beautifully and the band keeps adding surprises to the arrangement that match Jenny Lewis’s confidential delivery.

The song tells the tale of two friends who have taken different paths in life. The twist in the final verse will make you feel like you are falling through a trapdoor.

13. Dusty Springfield - I Don't Want To Hear It Anymore

I think that very few people sing or write popular music without starting out imitating or stealing from someone else. These days they call this ‘an
influence,’ just as the grander phrase ‘expressing myself’ has replaced saying what you mean.

I started out trying to sing rock and roll like John Lennon, Rick Danko and Van Morrison. I took the edge and careful enunciatiun of certain words from Lennon, tried to catch Danko’s nervy and punky phrasing and
have spent more than 25 years trying to get anywhere near Van’s explosive power.

Ballad singers are harder to copy. Every memorable quirk of the voice is so exposed. It anything, certain ballad singers led me to attempt to write songs that I could imagine them singing. Curtis Maytield and Jimi
Herix are two ingers who influenced the shape and sound of a few of my songs, although I doubt that you would guess it upon hearing them unless I told you.

On a few occasiuns my idealised compositions have actually reached the vuices for which they were written. These include two songs featured elsewhere in this collection (‘Stranger In The House’ and ‘Almost
Blue’) and ‘The Comedians,’ which I wrote imagining it being sung by Roy Orbison, and ‘Hidden Shame,’ which was styled for Johnny Cash.

Among the singers that I heard first in the 1960s, I was most attracted to the voice of Dusty Springfield. She helped introduce me to the songs of Burt Bacharach. In fact, the very first ‘cover’ that l ever had issued
on record was a live rendition of ‘I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself,’ which I learned from her recording. Far years, my ideal piano sound was that heard on Dusty’s ‘I Close My Eyes And Count To Ten.’

I wrote ‘Just A Memory’ in 1978 with the sound of Dusty Springtield in my mind. She wasn’t recording at the time but a couple of years later, the song found its way to her and she requested that I write an additional verse for what was a very short composition.

One of my favorite, it must mortifying, memories is of singing the new stanza to Dusty down a transatlantic telephone while suffering from
laryngitis. She was very good-humoured about it and although her version was not very well prodaced, it was a territic thrill simply to hear her sing the sparsely accompanied opening lines.

To hear Dusty Springfield at the pinnacle in her vocal artistry, with that knockout combinatinn of intimacy and soaring ease, I would always turn to the Dusty In Memphis album. It contains incredible arrangements of
songs by Bacharach and David, Goffin and King and this uncharacteristic drama about a betrayed woman by Randy Newman.

It also includes one of those moments that make magic out of pop music. Dusty sings: ‘Ain’t it sad, said a woman down the hall, That when a nice girl falls in love , ain’t it just too bad she had to fall for a boy who doesn’t care for her at all.’ And the backing singers deadpan: ‘It’s so sad.’


14. Randy Newman - Real Emotional Girl

Particularly after hearing the previous track, it is hard to believe that Randy Newman should now be best known for his songs for Toy Story or a tune like ' Short People,’ when he has written the greatest songs of the darkest wit for nearly forty years.

It is very hard to choose one song that represents everything that I admire about him. It is impossible to place a provocative song like ‘Rednecks’ above an effortless piece of humour like 'Tickle Me.’ In the
end, I had to go from this beautifully harmonized ballad and an intimate, oddly tender performance that hints at a little damage.


15. Diana Krall - Almost Blue

I wrote this song with Chet Baker in mind in 1981. The following year we
were fortunate enough to have Chet play a trumpet solo on the song
Shipbuilding.’ At the end of the session, I gave him a copy of my recording of this tune. Although I saw Chet several times in later years, the song was never mentioned again.

Shortly after Chet’s death in 1988, I discovered that he had in fact recorded the song on two occasions, once for Bruce Weber’s movie about his life, Let’s Get Lost, and a superior live rendition on Live In
Tokyo. It was thrilling to hear Chet sing and play the song, but in truth his whole being was rather fragile by that point in time.

Now years later, I had the remarkable experience of hearing the woman who I may now call my wife, unexpectedly perform the song at a concert date. From that very first impromptu rendition, Diana completely
owned the song.

This version, from her recent album, The Girl In The Other Room, has unsurprisingly become my favourite among the many covers this title has been fortunate enough to receive.

The piano prelude casts such a wonderful spell and that little quote from ‘My Funny Valentine’ in the last verse just about makes the record perfect. Diana’s beautiful vocal performance has finally realized the song the way I first imagined it to be.


16. Paul Simon - Peace Like A River

If one were asked to dare suggest alternative anthems from the United States of America, it would be tempting to propose Randy Newman’s ‘Sail Away,’ Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Keep On Pushing’ or Paul Simon’s ‘American
Tune.’ These are songs that ask sincere and difficult questions with powerful, enduring music rather than simply offering bland adoration to a damaged and still perfectible ideal.

Propelled by Paul Simon’s incredible acoustic guitar playing, this song summons up a sense of dread and watchfulness that is all too timely: ‘Four in the morning, I woke up from out of my dream/Nowhere to go but back to sleep but I’m reconciled/Oh, oh, oh, oh/I’m gonna be up for a while.’

17. Joe Tex - The Love You Save (May Be Your Own)


My friend Bill Bentley turned me on to this one in the 1980s. I knew Joe Tex more for his dance and novelty records. I couldn’t believe the tenderness in the vocal performance of this stoic and dignified ballad.


18. Freda Payne - Bring The Boys Home

This is a 1970 Invictus production by Holland/Dozier/Holland after they departed from Tamla Motown, having written so many wonderful hits. It is
sad to reflect that a Vietnam-inspired tune could be the product of today’s newspaper headlines. Thankfully, the record still sounds as sane and
passionate as ever, and the lyrical sentiment seems a fine way to end this collection.

[laughingcrow]

Unavailable to buy if you live in Region 2.....natch! goddam McCoffee joints!

[Mr. Average]

I purchased the record because I felt compelled to add it to my collection, but I did not expect that the song/artist combination to be so entertaining and to provide such insight into the sounds that attract EC and shape his writing.

I enjoy the record very much. It is really quite interesting to hear parallels in style that these artist demonstrate through these songs.

[SweetPear]

I just opened it up. Played Diana's version of Almost Blue. I think it's awful. Doesn't do the song justice at all.
So far I've just skipped through it. I'm very intrigued. It's really interesting. I like the cover and the sleeve layout.
I also purchased it because I felt compelled to add it my collection.

[Mr. Average]

Almost Blue doesn't fit at, I agree. Who could sing Almost Blue and raise it higher than EC? The liner notes (transcribed here somewhere) indicate that she 'owns' the song now because of her interpretation. I felt he was throwing his wife a ...let me restate that: I felt that he was including her version to promote her artistry, and that it did not really fit well with the others.

It is a little odd though, because he mentions in the notes the bands that had such a HUGE influence on his writing style and singing styyle, and as I recall none of them are represented. So I kind of misinterpreted the disc intent...I purchased it thinking it consisted of artists that Elvis credits with Directly shaping his music...his sound. Instead, I think it is intended as insight into what he finds enjoyable to listen to, whether he would ever care to emulate their style or not.

Funny thing about Almost Blue is that the target market for this record is current elvis costello fans. Many current Elvis fans have already heard Diana sing Almost Blue, and have found it quite unremarkable. So it is a strange inclusion. Nonetheless, I like the compilation (as a whole) very much.

[johnfoyle]

Bump , bump!

[normabuel]

I hadn't seen this thread. Sorry. I repeat my comments from the other thread below:

Regarding The Beatles: "I first heard the Beatles in 1962. They changed everything. It is completely impossible for me to pick just one song of theirs, so I won't choose any of them." More likely, however, whoever put the CD together couldn't get the rights to any Beatle songs.

I would have thought he would have included a Tom Waits song, maybe instead of two Randy Newman compositions.

[johnfoyle]

Bob Dylan's Artist Choice -

http://www.allalongthewatchtower.dk/pho ... p?1,360881

[The imposter]

Listen here: http://ecrc-2.blogspot.com.es/2014/03/a ... tello.html